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I am bringing this up as questions about Heroku are being (IMHO) prematurely closed.

This is a 'fork' of the 2012 question Are questions about heroku on or off topic?.

Here is some prior art around expanding this community to products other than the CRM:

Heroku is one of many products offered by Salesforce. There is a lot of other things that Salesforce offers, and the Ohana may come here asking questions about lots of different products. I think we should be open to all questions about Salesforce products.

Some facts:

  • The Heroku product has grown significantly in breadth over the last 7 years.
  • Heroku is not a separate autonomous company. It is a product sold by Salesforce.
  • People run lots of different integrations via Heroku with other Salesforce products. It is often part of their overall business solution that incorporates many different products.
  • Heroku has a lot of Heroku-only product features (e.g. which features to use, how features work, configuration) that would not be appropriate to discuss on Stack Overflow.

If these questions should not be closed, what is the right way to request these questions be re-opened?

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    Having seen a few of the Heroku questions people ask, I would guess that 95% would be better asked on Stackoverflow. – Robs Sep 22 '18 at 22:33
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What I see here is two heroku employees (Jon McCartie, wuputah) asking for this community's help to not arbitrarily stamp out questions that are heroku-service related, just cuz they say "heroku". (You know...heroku...in other words, Salesforce.)

Which to me says my heroku colleagues are trying to engage in a meaningful way with questions here on SFSE.

If that produces good useable help documentation here in SFSE that is Salesforce-related, is that not furthering the underlying goal of SFSE?

Being in the "rest of Salesforce not heroku" side of Salesforce, this reflects an internal move that is seeing all of us who's job is developers and platform work harder to be one Ohana internally, and thus reflect that out to our community.

As has been already said, there is a big surface area of configuring the heroku service to work in a project that is will use the service, and not specific to the language it is written in. Why can't those questions be asked here?

The heroku service is part of the footprint of Salesforce platform offerings regardless of whether heroku is connected to an org. Things like private spaces, heroku pipelines, add-on compatibility can operate independently of an org connection. Of course there are things like heroku connect where there will be an org, too. In all the above we have existing Salesforce customers who are beginning to use these. It will be weird for them to be told, "those Salesforce questions have to be asked on StackOverflow."

(begin edit 12 Nov, 2018)

But there is already a heroku community on StackOverflow

The trouble is that StackOverflow has a clearly stated focus on programming. From SO's help: "...working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about programming." Typically, non-coding heroku-specific configuration questions are closed on SO because they are not about code. In other words, the heroku community there is limited only to programming questions by design. Heroku service and config questions are not welcome.

Alternately, our stated purpose is, "With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about anything Salesforce related."

The Salesforce technology ethos has always welcomed a mix of code and configuration. Since we already allow config-based questions on this Stack Exchange, it would follow to allow configuration of the heroku service here in the same manner we do with Lightning Platform ("core salesforce"), marketing cloud, commerce cloud, pardot, etc.).

(end edit 12 Nov, 2018)

SFSE is a pleasant community

Let me also advocate for this move on the basis that SO can be intimidating. I would much rather ask a question in this community who I know, and who know me than the wide open often unkind world that is SO. We've tried hard to foster supportive constructive feedback and a sense of respect for all comers. I'm not saying we let every question pass for that reason. Language questions that can be answered independently from the heroku service don't belong.

So yeah...if a question is asked here about Salesforce's Heroku PaaS, why can't they be asked in the Salesforce StackEchange?

Edit

In pursuit of the above suggestions, I've modified the heroku tag wiki (pending peer review) here in SFSE to say the following:

The heroku tag in Salesforce Stack Exchange should be used for questions pertaining to the use and troubleshooting of the heroku service itself. Questions on heroku-supported languages should be directed to one of the heroku language tags on stackoverflow.com.

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    Your logic is sound, but it doesn't seem to take into account that their is already a clear community around heroku on stackoverflow while there isn't much of one here. – Ralph Callaway Nov 8 '18 at 1:29
  • Excellent question. I've added to my answer above. Thanks for bringing this up, @RalphCallaway. – pchittum Nov 12 '18 at 9:45
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    @pchittum Thanks for the update. As long as barrier between what should be on SFSE and what should be on SO is maintained we can have a healthy community for Heroku trailblazers on SFSE. – Pranay Jaiswal Nov 12 '18 at 16:29
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If it's a programming question, users should definitely go to Stack Overflow. However, Heroku is a Salesforce product and Heroku customers are Salesforce customers. Questions about the service absolutely belong here (just like Quip: https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/quip )

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    I think it is reasonable to distinguish between the Salesforce platform and the Salesforce product suite and ask which of these the "Salesforce" in our title pertains to. My personal opinion is pretty close to Adrian's, but if there's an argument that "S" in SFSE == Salesforce product suite, I'm for hearing it. Our help center text could stand to be clearer on the boundary of on-topicness. – David Reed♦ Sep 19 '18 at 19:25
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I just want to add a couple of notes.

  • SFSE currently has 88 questions tagged Heroku. (Of course, that does not include deleted questions and does not distinguish between open/closed/answered).
  • Stack Overflow has 29,068 questions tagged Heroku. (And a well-developed tag wiki).
  • Heroku's own main support page explicitly directs users to Stack Overflow:

Resources

Engage with peers or explore the docs.
Visit Stack Overflow

Given the enormous disparity in question numbers and the fact that questions about Heroku other than Salesforce integration are relatively likely to require knowledge of, e.g., PHP, Java, Python, or Ruby to solve, Stack Overflow seems like a pragmatically better place for them to go - and it already clearly has a substantial Heroku community.

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    I'm not sure I agree that disparity in number of questions is a good basis for deciding whether a topic should live or die here. There are Salesforce questions both here and on StackOverflow. There is an overwhelmingly larger number of questions on Salesforce in this StackExchange as compared to StackOverflow. However, StackOverflow does not automatically close Salesforce questions out of hand. – pchittum Sep 20 '18 at 10:35
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    I didn't mean it quite that strongly, @pchittum; sorry if I overstated. All I meant to say is that there are some pragmatic considerations that suggest general Heroku questions may in some sense fit in better on Stack Overflow. – David Reed♦ Sep 20 '18 at 11:30
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    From the Heroku side, we want programming related questions to go to Stack Overflow. But questions about Heroku products, integrations with Salesforce (like Heroku Connect) belong here. As you've seen in my recent comments on new questions, I have no problem pushing programming-specific questions back to Stack Overflow. But questions that involve the Heroku platform seem like a better fit under the SFSE umbrella. Thanks. :) – Jon McCartie Sep 20 '18 at 15:49
  • I just took a look at the questions tagged "Heroku" (now just over 100) expecting to find that only a small fraction of them had been answered. My assumption was that questions about Heroku would generally be more on the programming side than on the platform side, or at least that they'd require knowledge of both, and that most Salesforce platform users wouldn't have that knowledge. My gut feeling is still saying people will be better served by asking Heroku questions elsewhere, but the numbers show that almost 70% of Heroku-tagged questions have been answered. I'm very surprised. – Shane Steinfeld Sep 30 '18 at 20:59
  • @pchittum any chance you know who at heroku who could figure out how to update the support instructions that direct users to SFSE when they should be going to SO? see salesforce.meta.stackexchange.com/a/2815/594 – Ralph Callaway Nov 8 '18 at 1:27
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I personally disagree. I am not saying my word is law by any means, but offering my own opinion here.

Questions about Heroku aren't really about the Salesforce platform. It's not like Marketing Cloud, where it is tightly integrated, poorly documented, and fairly narrow in feature scope.

If you have a question about your Heroku integration into Salesforce, that is clearly on topic. If you have a Heroku question which does not connect to the core platform in any way, I am still inclined to agree with the close votes. I won't go out of my way to close such questions, but won't help reopen them either.

We shall see what others think.

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  • Also: why Quip but not Heroku? (I've edited the question to add a link to Quip questions) – wuputah Sep 19 '18 at 21:35
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    Like SFMC, Quip is always integrated with a Salesforce organization. At least, that's my understanding. It cannot be a standalone instance completely unrelated to the titular platform of our exchange. – Adrian Larson♦ Sep 19 '18 at 21:36
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    I see. To me, it should be about the content of the question, rather than what ties the product has to a Salesforce org. The questions about Quip seem to be as equally disconnected from the [original] Salesforce platform as the questions about Heroku. (Of course, I argue Heroku is part of the Salesforce platform, and I would love to see Heroku users embraced by this community.) – wuputah Sep 20 '18 at 1:29
  • Quip also has a much more constrained feature set. – Adrian Larson♦ Sep 20 '18 at 1:51
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    I genuinely don't think Heroku question belongs here... Its just a hosting platform which was bought by SF, I mean if we keep posting everything related to SF It won't take long people Posting about TIME magazine(Owned by SF) to appear here. – Pranay Jaiswal Sep 20 '18 at 11:15
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    @PranayJaiswal TIME magazine was not purchased by SF, it was a personal purchase by Marc Benioff – Robs Sep 20 '18 at 15:26
  • @AdrianLarson, that's not true. Quip is a standalone product (essentially google docs) that has an integration into Salesforce. The integration isn't even that good. There's only a few things you can pull from Salesforce into the documents – brezotom Sep 21 '18 at 12:52
  • @PranayJaiswal but what about the various heroku features, i.e. heroku connect that are exclusively to salesforce? – Ralph Callaway Nov 7 '18 at 6:53
  • your word's not law? – Ralph Callaway Nov 7 '18 at 7:01
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    @RalphCallaway I am okay with things that connect with SF in a way. But things like unable to deploy a java container on Heroku should be kept away from this platform. – Pranay Jaiswal Nov 7 '18 at 14:20
  • @PranayJaiswal totally agree, heroku w/o sfdc connection should be on stack overflow (IMO) – Ralph Callaway Nov 8 '18 at 1:23
  • @RalphCallaway I'm not sure if you meant insult but your previous comment comes across as a jibe. – Adrian Larson♦ Nov 8 '18 at 1:24
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I think it's important to not that at least in some instances heroku is directing stuff to SFSE that should go to SO from their support flow. See this gif for an example path.

I followed the instruction that was listed on Heroku.

For all programming related questions related to particular languages or frameworks, please visit the Stack Overflow community. Stack Overflow is a great place to get help from fellow Heroku users by searching thousands of previous questions or asking your own. For all questions related to the Heroku platform or specific Heroku products, please visit the Salesforce Stack Exchange community. This was not a general JSON question. It was a Heroku pipeline question.

It seems like someone at heroku decided to dedicate heroku quetsions to salesforce stack exchange, when they probably should have told them to go over to stackoverflow for those as well. (Except for heroku connect and other salesforce specific features, which due make more sense here.

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